Winter 1999, Volume 16.2

Conversation

A. Robert Lee

Gerald Vizenor in Dialogue with A. Robert Lee

A. Robert Lee is
Professor of American Literature at Nihon University, Japan. He formerly taught at the
University of Kent at Canterbury. His publications include Designs of Blackness: Mappings
in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America (1998) and Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor
Reader (1994).

Gerald Vizenor is professor of Native American Literature at
the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book, Fugitive Poses: Native
American Scenes of Absence and Presence was published in the Abraham Lincoln Lecture
Series at the University of Nebraska Press.

The extract which follows, taken from our Gerald
Vizenor: Postindian
Conversations (forthcoming 1999), is meant to highlight one of Native Americas
leading literary voices. It forms part of a wide-ringing conversation conducted in
Berkeley at different times over the past two years, about Vizenors writing, about
his views on the iconographies of representation and self-representation of (and in)
Native culture, about what it means to live on or off reservation as a modern native
American.Gerald Vizenor: Postindian
Conversations (forthcoming 1999), is meant to highlight one of Native Americas
leading literary voices. It forms part of a wide-ringing conversation conducted in
Berkeley at different times over the past two years, about Vizenors writing, about
his views on the iconographies of representation and self-representation of (and in)
Native culture, about what it means to live on or off reservation as a modern native
American.

May we turn to your first publications of original
haiku poems. Why did you start your career as a writer with haiku poetry?

I must say, once more, my start as a writer was by chance, and
the ease of imagistic poetry. Haiku, in a sense, caught me out on the road to nature, and
that was my best turn to literature. The tease of nature is in my blood, and that must
make visions out of taste and sound, and the outcome, no doubt, is more imagistic than
exotic, or discovery. Nature is tricky, a constant tease, and even the most obvious native
traces of the seasons are creative sensations, a chance of stories. Sometimes that mighty
tease of nature comes out in blank verse, but never in my poetry. Now, haiku is my
aesthetic survivance.

Why so?

Listen, my sense of haiku is an imagistic gaze. Yes, a natural
gaze, the meditative gaze of visual memories. The turn of nature is in me, and in
everyone. So, my start was mythic, a tricky sense of motion on the road that connected me
to nature, a native presence and, at the same time, my creation is in the book. My haiku
poems, and the chance of survivance, created me in nature and the book.

Chance, however, does not reveal the romance of my presence, and
certainly not the common risks and doubts of being a writer of imagistic poetry. I was
moved to write, to be known in the book, but my brush with literature in public school was
not very creative or productive. Most of my literature teachers might have been right, at
the time, to rush every sentence with a canon measure. I might not have become a writer if
they had done otherwise. Pedagogy was an ironic enforcer, but my sense of visual memories
survived the courses, and that was more than enough for me to learn the virtues of
resistance. How else could the teachers be sure that only visual memories might survive
the manners of a high school education? Maybe my teachers were at their best to scare me
out of literature, because their very lessons cut me out of the mannered culture of
sonnets.

My visual memories are survivance stories, and the ease of haiku
images, even in translation, made immediate sense to me, and that without a canon course
in literature. The scenes that carried me were in nature, images of a pond, sunrise on the
wings of a dragonfly, the march of a blue heron, cracks in the river ice, the sounds of
spring, and not in the obscure cuts of literary histories. The images of haiku are
accessible in nature and culture, and that alone was more than any poetry had ever given
to me in the past. I was amused, at first, by the common, natural scenes in haiku poetry.
The imagistic scenes were my nature, and then, later, my thoughts turned to the notion of
possession and impermanence, the very tease of my aesthetic presence in nature.
[Kobayashi] Issa comes to mind in the traces of memories and seasons. He remembers, in The
Year of My Life, the death of his daughter in this haiku translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa:

the world of dew
is the world of dew
and yet
and yet

I was eighteen years old at the time, and every haiku moment was
a tease of my presence and survivance. Haiku was a great gift, and yet, the images were my
first memorable flights of impermanence.

The United States Army, by chance, sent me to serve in northern
Japan. There, haiku caught me on the road as a soldier and turned me back to the seasons,
back to the memories of my own nature. The turns and conversions of haiku were not exotic,
because nature is my sense of presence, not discovery. My haiku scenes are similar, in a
sense, to the images in anishinaabe dream songs, and now, these mythic connections
seem so natural to me. Once, worlds apart in time and place, these images came together by
chance. Many anishinaabe dream songs are about the presence of animals in visions.
My haiku are the same, and yet, and yet, the contradiction of those magistic scenes are my
impermanence and survivance. Haiku poems were my very first creations, and since then
imagistic scenes of nature are always present in my writing. The presence of nature in my
novels, even in my essays, is an imagistic survivance as an author. My survivance is in
nature and the book.

As if you understood your own call to be a writer?

More than a call, that first tease of haiku was my conversion,
and maybe a visionary transformation, at least in my aesthetic survivance in nature. Yet,
these imagistic moments, the very scenes of my creation in literature, are elusive, a
natural turn with the seasons, or, "a stone, a leaf, a door," in the words of
the novelist Thomas Wolfe.

Was it your ambition to "Americanize" haiku? In your
most recent haiku, for instance, you create envois with each poem, an original style. I
dont mean just the form, but the subjects you pick, the native memories, and the use
of nature in Minnesota?

Not mere ambition, but creation, and my haiku scenes are the
tease of seasons, not cultures or nations. The seasons create the haiku scenes, and the
images are common not exotic. What comes to mind, of course, are my memories of seasons on
the run in Minnesota. One morning, the traces of winter in the autumn, and later, the rush
of spring on the twig, in the sumac near the river, and my conversions, season after
season, in the curve of the sun and wild shadows at the tree lines. My haiku come out of
these experiences and memories, and my very creation, in a sense, is that pause to create
the seasons, the very visions of me in nature. I am a ghost writer of nature, and the
conversions, the mythic turns of the solstice, tease the sumac and sparrows, catkins and
cedar waxwings, thunder and bears, and yet, and yet, here we are in the book. I wonder if
my presence is created in the haiku scenes of the seasons. Sometimes, the pauses in nature
are memories, the scenes of my presence. The seasons are sounds, the thunder of ice
cracking on the lake, and the creases of the wind on a spider web. My creation is that
pause in nature, and haiku scenes are the rights of my impermanence in the book. And, my
sense of presence, then and now, is in the images of great haiku poets.

Yosa Buson, the son of a farmer, was born more than two centuries
ago, and his haiku scenes come to me as a presence in translation, and so we meet by
nature in the book. He was a cultural dilettante and, at the same time, a brilliant haiku
poet. Buson wrote about the seasons, and teased his own transience. He was not devoted to
nature, as other poets were, but he created exquisite imagistic poems. R. H. Blyth, in Haiku:
Eastern Culture, translates this haiku by Buson:

winter rain
a mouse runs
over the koto

I wrote back to him one winter with this haiku poem: cold
rain, field mice rattle the dishes, Busons koto. The koto, as you know,
is a stringed instrument. Busons transience, the nature of haiku, and my flights of
impermanence, came together with others in the tricky imagistic seasons of the book.

One of the things that strikes me in your haiku is the humor. The
humor and trickster resonance that come of the tension between insects and culture, or as
you write in this haiku, between flies, natural rhythm, and pink grapefruit, as follows:

Matsuo Basho might have created that last line, honor your
partners. Nature is honored by his haiku and haibun meditation, and his subtle humor
on the road. He was a generous wanderer who turned to Zen Buddhism and devoted most of his
experiences and memories to the imagistic truth of nature. Basho might not have posed a
square dance of trickster flies, but he was amused on the very day of his death that the
flies were delighted and gathered on the sliding screens. Makoto Ueda, in Basho and His
Interpreters, translated this haiku scene:

in the seasonal rain
a cranes legs
have become short.

Kobayashi Issa, however, might have teased the green flies to
dance with him right out of the restaurant. His sympathies were always with animals and
insects. Issa has a subtle sense of irony. One of my favorite haiku poems was published in
World Within Walls by Donald Keene:

skinny frog
dont be discouraged
issa is here.

My haiku teases the obvious perversion of "human
nature," the common will to kill insects, and that is the very tension of the square
dance scene on the pink grapefruit. The unstated is not surreal, as flies might dance for
their breakfast, but rather a conversion of distaste and dominance. The last line of my
haiku, honor your partners, must tease the memories of a rural square dance, you
know, the allemande turns of couples in the dance. Choose your sides and allemande in a
tricky haiku with the fat green flies. That dance of the flies is my aesthetic survivance,
and a tease of monotheism, but what is not a tease?

Thats a nice tease, as it is, again, in "White Earth,
Images and Agonies." You have a fine line in that poem, "tricksters roam the
rearview mirrors." Do most of your poems operate as "rearview mirrors"?

Maybe, and the animals at the tree lines at the end of
that poem send back the hats and rusted traps. That direction is a reversion of the
beaver in the fur trade, an imagistic ghost dance and return of nature. The images in the
mirror come in so many stories, and mine are part of that common play of representations.
My imagistic gaze is twice reversed in the rearview mirror. Once as a trickster pose, a
transmutation of my presence, and twice, yes twice, as the storier. So, you might ask, who
are these teasers, shadows aback, the tricksters that roam at our rear in the wake of the
mirror?

How did poetry help your development as a writer?

Poetry, and especially haiku, taught me how to hold an imagistic
gaze, and that gaze is my survivance. Many chapters in my novels begin with a natural
metaphor, and create a sense of the season, the tease of a haiku scene. I learned how to
create tension in concise images, by the mere presence of nature. Plum petals in a
thunderstorm, bears at the tree line, squirrels at the window, green flies on the
grapefruit, are a few examples. When my son Robert was in elementary school I visited his
classes once or twice a year to talk about haiku poetry. Haiku was accessible, and the
students did not have to know much about stories to understand the play of nature and the
beast in language. These students were at home with imagistic tension in language. They
carried the memories of pets across the street in heavy traffic, hunted mosquitoes
in a
tent, and teased their teachers.

I said, "here is one word, and the image of a word, and you
give me another word that creates some tension between the words." I said
"dog," and they said "traffic," and the tension of a cat was the
presence of a dog. These words and images were more than structural associations, because
the students actually created the tension by words and the suggestion of motion in visual
memory. Regrettably, some teachers have tortured the very best haiku scenes with
possessive pronouns, and delegated imagistic poetry to a mere lesson in the punctuated
evolution of literature.

You bowed in with
Two Wings the Butterfly in 1962, a
pamphlet of haiku poems printed by inmates at the Minnesota State Reformatory in Saint
Cloud, and two years later Raising the Moon Vines, your first book of haiku, was
published in Minneapolis. But youve also long been interested in other literary
forms. I want to ask you about your film scenario Harold of Orange and your play Ishi
and the Wood Ducks. What lay behind Harold, the trickster character in your film?
Two Wings the Butterfly in 1962, a
pamphlet of haiku poems printed by inmates at the Minnesota State Reformatory in Saint
Cloud, and two years later Raising the Moon Vines, your first book of haiku, was
published in Minneapolis. But youve also long been interested in other literary
forms. I want to ask you about your film scenario Harold of Orange and your play Ishi
and the Wood Ducks. What lay behind Harold, the trickster character in your film?

Two things, the actual play of language in the script and the
tease of images in Harold of Orange. The first, of course, is the dialogue of the
characters, and the second is the ironic tease of obvious visual images in the film, such
as the structural reversal of team names at a baseball game. The natives arrive with the
word "anglo" printed on their red tee shirts, and the foundation directors wear
the name "indian" on their white tee shirts. Other active scenes of tricky
tension are obvious, such as the conversations on the school bus, natives in neckties,
human skeletons in a glass case, the play of socioacupuncture, and more.

The script creates an ironic tension too, as the characters
announce their tricky schemes, and conduct a sacred naming ceremonies out of a cigar box
in a parking lot. Here, names such as Baltic and Connecticut are the property cards in the
game of Monopoly. Harold Sinseer and the other native characters are always at the tease
and turn of irony. For instance, as the Warriors of Orange and the directors of the Bily
Foundation are riding around on a school bus in the city, Ted Velt, a conservative
foundation man, asks Son Bear, How many Indians were there at the time Christopher
Columbus discovered the New World? Well, first of all, who would know? Even a shaman with
a thick memory would turn this unanswerable question around to a tricky fact. Here, the
underlying irony is that the foundation man knows everything about the absence of Indians,
an arrogance posed in the questions, and nothing about the presence of natives. He knows
too much about the inventions, and movie simulations, but too little about native humor
and tricky stories. Son Bear, who wears a Sun Dance film festival hat, pauses, removes his
earphones, and says, None, not one. Naturally, this evasion troubles the foundation man.
What do you mean, none? Son Bear strains to explain that "Columbus never discovered
anything, and when he never did he invented Indians because we never heard the word before
he dropped by by accident." Velt persists, Well, let me phrase the question in a
different way then. "How many tribal people were there here then, ahh, before
Columbus invented Indians?" Son Bear pauses once more and then announces, with great
authority, "Forty-nine million, seven hundred twenty-three thousand, one hundred and
ninety-six on this continent, including what is now Mexico."

I should mention another ironic scene in Harold of Orange. The
tension, again, is in the word games on the school bus, or the red pinch on the yellow bus
of new foundation fools. Andrew Burch asks a Warrior of Orange, "I have considered
the origin theories of the American Indians. Some are quite interesting. I find the Bering
Strait migration theory to be the most credible. How about you then, what are your
thoughts on the subject?" So, here is another question about absence over presence,
and the pose is cultural arrogance. New Crows, however, will not be cornered as he plays
to the arrogance of the foundation man, "From here to there, we emerged from the
flood here, the first people, unless you think we are related to the panda bear."
Andrew touches his necktie as he responds, "Actually, what you say makes a great deal
of sense, but the problem I seem to have, you see, is that there is so little evidence to
support your idea." New Crows smiles and says, "Jesus Christ was an American
Indian." Andrew, outwitted in the play of his own arrogance, turns away and says,
"Was he now, who would have guessed?" For me the ironies were doubled in the
production of the film, as the native actors made the scenes with no acting experience.
The others, however, were very practiced and experienced stage and screen actors.

Would that also hold for your play
Ishi and the Wood Ducks?
The double ironies? Would that also hold for your play
Ishi and the Wood Ducks?
The double ironies?

Yes, and there are several structural reversals in my play. Ishi
is the subject, the object, the absence, the presence, and the main character in his
stories. The play opens on a bench outside a federal court and ends in the First District
Court of Character. Ishi is on trial for alleged violations of the Indian Arts and Crafts
Act. He is an artist in the play, but could not, in fact, prove that he was indeed a
native. He was, after all, named the last of his tribe, the last stone age man, so how
could he prove he was anyone by law?

Justice Alfred Kroeber rules, at the end of the play, that
"Ishi is real and the law is not." He is his own tribe. "Ishi is an artist,
he is our remembrance of justice, and that is his natural character." Ishi is present
and an active character in the prologue, and the first and last acts. The audience is
aware of his ironic presence in the second and third acts, but only his name and ashes in
an urn are mentioned by the other characters in the play.

I think these elaborations of absence and presence are more
intricate and precise than a mirror image, and more ironic than the mere abstract reversal
of consciousness, character, and history. Ishi is a visionary presence, and, at the same
time, he is an ethnographic absence. He is my tease of a native holoconsciousness, yes,
the entire consciousness of natives in the play, and, in another sense, my creation is his
survivance.

Ishi has a presence in the generous bait and tease of his wood
duck stories. He is a voice of memories, and he is wise, witty, and tricky. Ironically,
the other characters are the real absence, as they forever hold to their ethnographic
discoveries and documents. Ishi is about in every act in the play and hears everything the
experts say in his name. He, on the other hand, sits on a bench outside a courtroom and
talks with an old woman about names.

Ishi is my museum name, not my real name.
Same with me, says Boots.
Do you have a sacred name?
Boots, the boys teased me about my boots.
Ishi is my nickname.
Boots is my sacred name.
No one has ever heard my sacred name.
No one has every heard my real name.
Alfred Kroeber gave me a museum name.
My husband lied to me about our name.

Alfred Kroeber, as you know, was the generous anthropologist who
cared for Ishi in a museum at the University of California. Kroeber said he had
"perceptive power far keener than those of highly educated white men. He reasons
well, grasps an idea quickly, has a keen sense of humor, is gentle, thoughtful, and
courteous and has a higher type of mentality than most Indians." Ishi, it would seem,
was the great scout of native discoveries, and should have been given an honorary
doctorate. Surely, he was aware of the ironies in his name, because his wood duck stories
never ended. Ishi, the tricky museum native, earned his nickname from an anthropologist
and he sent one back at the same time. Ishi named Kroeber the "Big Chiep."
There, in a name, in his tricky presence, is an ironic reversion of his native absence.

May we turn to another irony, that you were sued by a sculptor in
the name of Ishi. Whatever became of that play in court?

That was a year of double ironies, as the trial, my legal play in
court, folded over a stage reading of Ishi and the Wood Ducks in Chicago. Ishi is
both a presence and a silent witness in my play, but only his name was evidence in the
actual court trial. Surely, the native tease is eternal in his name, that is, in the
ironic scripture of his museum name by anthropology. My play Ishi and the Wood Ducks was
published in the college anthology Native American Literature before Harkin Lucero,
the sculptor, sued me over what seemed to be nothing more than the expectations of a retro
simulation. Actually, the expectations that became a civil action started a decade
earlier, in the late eighties, at the University of California, Berkeley. I had formally
proposed that half of Dwinelle Hall be named Ishi Hall. The campus newspaper and student
organizations supported the proposal, and many faculty reviewed my idea favorably, if not
amused by my naivete about academic manifest manners. The procedures, as you might expect,
were very complicated, but who would have thought at the time that a mere subcommittee,
organized at the lowest level of faculty governance, would vote against my proposal to
honor the very first native employee of the University of California.

Alfred Kroeber, you remember, had read in the newspaper about
this silent native man and arranged, in the late summer of 1911, for him to live and work
in the Museum of Anthropology. The Museum was then located in San Francisco. Ishi was
probably about fifty years old at the time of his fateful discovery by anthropologists. He
died of tuberculosis five years later on March 25, 1916. Yes, and his ashes are now in a
small black pot in a niche at Mount Olivet Cemetery which is near San Francisco.
Thats where the play and the actual court suit come together. The jury was very
interested in what was actually said over the niche, and that is also a scene in my play.

I tried several times to keep my proposal alive on campus, and
after eight years another committee offered me a compromise, the first serious
consideration, to name a courtyard in his honor. I was very pleased and, as they say, the
rest is history, including the jury trail and my play. Ishi Court was dedicated as part of
Dwinelle Hall in May 1993. Justice Gary Strankman delivered a very moving commemoration of
Ishi, and later, at the reception, several people suggested that we consider a sculpture
in Ishi Court.

Were you considering monuments at the time?

No, that was only a courtesy thought. I was more interested in
names and endowments than sculpture, in part, because monuments take too much time and
money. But it was a fine dedication and reception and many ideas were brushed with
pleasure. Caitlin Croughan was at the commemoration and invited me to meet Harkin Lucero,
a local sculptor, and that was the critical start of the retro simulations of Ishi. So, we
met a few weeks later. Luceros ambition, it seemed to me at the time, far exceeded
his talents as a sculptor. He had already concocted an image of Ishi that was inane, and
not because he was ironic or even surreal, but because he was a retro romantic, you know,
a healer dealer in mundane simulations of Indians as great spirit sculptures. I was
courteous over lunch, and less so at the columbarium, but, from the very start, not really
interested in his work. The idea of the sculpture seemed to be forgotten, but then, out of
the granite dust comes this huge law suit against me, against Caitlin Croughan, his
presumed agent, and the University of California.

What was the outcome?

Harkin Lucero complained that he had an oral contract to create a
sculpture for Ishi Court, and so, he sued me, Croughan, and the University for fifty
thousand dollars to cover, what he claimed to be design and casting costs. This was
nonsense, and a nuisance, of course, but nothing could be taken lightly, so we demanded a
jury trial. Ishi was there to tease me in court, and he might have been a silent witness
in the jury room during deliberations. The verdict, after four days of trial and
deliberations, was in my favor, and that was in February 1997. Ishi, no doubt, was not
pleased that Lucero had staged his potty spirit show at Mount Olivet Cemetery. Lucero had
arranged to have the niche at the columbarium opened, and then, with a newspaper reporter
and a video film maker present, of course, he lifted the black pot out of the niche.
Lucero told me and others at the columbarium that he could feel the spirit of Ishi coming
through the pot to his hands, and then his arms, and, no doubt, other parts of his body he
did not mention.

This scene is in the play, but was it also evidence in court?

Yes, and the jury watched a video production of that very scene,
apparently trying to determine if anyone made him a promise to create a sculpture. Lucero
made a rather awkward rubbing of the name and inscription on the pot. The paper was too
thick. Ishi would have laughed about such a performance. He was particularly amused, it
seemed to me, when the cemetery executive, a young woman, announced that Ishi not only
made his own death pot but he also carved his own name in the clay. None of this was true,
of course, because his preparation for death would have been in visions, songs and
stories, not in pottery. Ishi might have told the experts at the columbarium that he was
not a pot maker, and the letters carved on the pot were in a standard type style. The
sculptor, who claimed to be native, should have known that the inscription on the pot was
not a sacred name, not even a native nickname. Ishi was a museum name in Times New Roman,
and Lucero, in a mundane gesture made a rubbing of the name on paper.

Here, of course, is yet another retro simulation of names and
type styles.

Zero Larkin, the native sculptor in Ishi and the Wood Ducks, raises
the rubbing of the name to the camera and the audience. "Ishi is with me, our spirit
is one in his sacred name," said Zero. "Im going to blast his sacred
signature, right from this rubbing, at the bottom of my stone sculpture, my tribute to his
power as an Indian." Ishi was in court, the verdict was in my favor, and now he has
another story.